If I could be honest for a moment, I think you should read through this and the short version again and really focus on what you've written.If you are actually serious about this art business, you need to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. In short, I think you need to place a much greater emphasis on realism, and much less on manga. Having a style really only holds you back at this point (though that's not to say you can't still develop one, but it shouldn't be high on your priority list). I think you should also review your fundamentals- value and construction, things like that. And I mean really, REALLY graft at them. I've been doing lots of stuff purely in greyscale recently to improve my sense of value; maybe that's something you'd like to try too.

Train your eye by doing lots and LOTS of studies (from life, diagrams and photos) and posting them up somewhere, master studies (copying the works of the Masters, like Sargent [link] - and it's not just copying, it's a very useful exercise which will help you to see what they did with colour and value and composition to make them successful pieces; trust me, artists-in-training have been copying the masters for centuries upon centuries. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you). Tutorials such as this [link] are also invaluable and provide a fantastic overview of the fundamentals of figure construction. There's also the anatomy go-to guys: Loomis, Bridgman, Hogarth. Loomis has an excellent book about illustration in general that I highly recommend.

If I could also recommend you starting a sketchbook thread over at conceptart.org? It'd be a good place to dump all your studies. The people there are more than willing to provide you with a steady stream of helpful critique and suggestions for improvement. If you need a testament to just how much their feedback system works, I recommend looking at [link] this thread. dA is great for the social side of things, but for actual feedback I suggest places like conceptart (the Artist's Corner at the Penny Arcade forums are also very helpful and are a much smaller community, which might be more to your taste).

You seem to already have a great idea of just what it takes to be a successful artist (in terms of skill, at any rate), and you obviously have a lot of determination, but the road of improvement is very long, slow and hard- although the more you put into it, the faster it goes. And I'm just a learner myself- so please don't interpret this as an attack or an order, merely a suggestion from one self-taught artist to another.Best of luck (:

I've honestly been studying realism lately. That basically means that I don't pay attention in class and start drawing the first thing I see and then bash myself about what's wrong and erase it and re-draw it and so on. I end up not putting any of my "studies" up online, because I don't like putting everything on DeviantART, and not to mention I'd be bringing home a ton of my notes. Though, I'll consider joining conceptart.org, as intimidating as it appears. Going through what I've been doing, I realize that I need a place to put all my sketches so I can take comments and criticism. Thank you for the recommendation.

This tutorial isn't meant to be anything professional, though. These are all basic things that people I've encountered throughout my self-teaching have continuously stressed on and that I've decided to compile into one quick Deviation. There's a good number of artists that complain about anime fans attempting anime art without even really considering what it takes. The shame of it is that it looks like some of them could be good artists, but they're starting from the wrong place. From experience, I know that people need to just be pushed onto the "right path," if even a bit, and I was hoping that a tutorial like this would do that.

Thank you for the general tips, though. I'll keep these in mind as I keep practicing for the future. c:

oh heyyyy <3333333333333l have yet to have seen a tutorial with line of flow <3333333333333333 -spazzlololl-this is something i've tried explaining countless times but could never put words to ;u; oh you and your superior english skills <3